Still he hesitated, as though what he was about to do was perhaps forbidden. It could not have been a question of goodness or badness, for morality was certainly not built into him. Probably somewhere in his tapes there was a built-in command that forbade it, but he was too much his own master now to be hampered by such a thing. The door to the unknown outside passed within his field of view for a second as he moved about his work. The sight of it tripped something in his chest, and he felt again that strange sensation of growing power, of inherent change. First had come simple awareness; and then symbols had found their place in his world; and now he had discovered, in all its consuming fullness, curiosity. He carefully shorted out the cut-off unit. He was free. He stared at the board and the blinking lights and the huge dials with their swaying needles, at the levers and handles and buttons, and revelled in his freedom from them, rocking to and fro and rolling giddily from side to side, swamped with the completeness of it. The other two servomechs swung over slightly so that they could better cover the board alone. M-75 spun and rolled toward the great door. His hands clanged loudly against the door. The huge metal appendages, designed for other work than this, were awkward at first. But he was learning as he moved. He was now operating in a new universe, but the same laws, ultimately, worked. The first failure of coordination between visual data and the manipulation of metal hands quickly passed. Half a dozen trials and he had learned the new pattern, and it became data for future learning. He moved swiftly and deftly. He clutched the handhold and rolled backward, as he had seen the men do. The door slid open easily before his great weight and firm mechanical strength. He sped across the threshold, spun to face into the maze, and rolled down it, swinging sharply left and right, back and forth, around the corners of the jagged corridor. Data poured into his sensors. His awareness was a steady thing of growing intensity now, and he fed avidly on every fragment of information that crashed at him from the strange new world into which he rushed headlong. He struggled to evaluate and file the data as rapidly as it came to him. It seemed to exceed his capacity for instantaneous evaluation to an increasing degree that began to alarm him. But driven by curiosity as he was, he could only hurry on. He burst into a huge room, a room filled with roaring, rattling sounds that meant nothing to him. Two men stood before him, making loud noises. He searched his memory, and discovered only fragments of the sounds they made filed there. His curiosity, bursting, was boundless, and for a moment he was unable to decide which thing in this expanding universe to pursue first. Attracted by their movement, he swung ominously toward the men. They fled, making more noises. This, too, was data, and he filed it. * * * * *